Lorde adds guest vocals to Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” a song that muses on the complexities of female friendship, and helps create something revelatory.
To a lot of people these days, “ambivalent pop music” is an oxymoron. Catchy hooks tend to streamline complex emotions into universal, legible sentiments, temporarily dividing the world into teams: the heartbreakers vs. the victims, the happy vs. the sad, the boys vs. the girls. Infectious as they are, many of the songs on Charli XCX’s incisive sixth album, “Brat,” refuse to take sides, making them difficult to discuss in the explainer-generating, SEO-baiting grammar of modern pop standom. How refreshing.
Charli never mentioned Lorde by name on the album’s knotty ninth track, “Girl, So Confusing,” but all signs pointed to her being the somewhat socially awkward, poetry-loving doppelgänger to whom the song is addressed. (“People say we’re alike, they say we’ve got the same hair,” Charli sings, winking at those of us who remember when an interviewer asked her about writing Lorde’s “Royals.”)
It was less clear how we were supposed to understand this song in the limited and polarized language of 2020s musical fandom, which pits female pop stars against one another like pro athletes while still insisting that they “support women” at all times with a benevolent grin. “Sometimes I think you might hate me, sometimes I think I might hate you,” Charli babbles atop a strobe-lit A.G. Cook beat, one of the many “wait, are you even allowed to say that anymore?” moments on “Brat.” The song strains the vocabulary of clickbait. Is this a “diss track” or the start of a “feud”? Are the girlies fighting? And if they are, what could Lorde possibly be doing in the V.I.P. section of Charli’s recent show?
It’s complicated, and — blessedly — so is the surprise remix on which Lorde appears, firing off her first new lyrics in three years. After Charli unloads her feelings and projections in that first verse, Lorde responds with the run-on intensity of a late-night voice note: “You’d always say, ‘let’s go out,’ but then I’d cancel last minute,” the New Zealander confesses, “I was so lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures.” She then reveals, devastatingly, that she’s been “at war with my body,” insecure about fluctuations in her weight, and that the enigmatic aura she’s created is actually a stifling defense mechanism. That she does it all so succinctly in a cadence that effortlessly matches Cook’s beat should make everyone excited for her next album, whenever it arrives.
When their voices finally join to indict the whole catfight economy — “It’s you and me on the coin the industry loves to spend” — their unity feels stronger and more deeply earned than the usual radio-friendly platitudes about superwomen and solidarity. In recent years, the female pop star collaboration has become an omnipresent cliché, telegraphing frictionless friendship at best and attempting to boost chart numbers at worst. But the “Girl, So Confusing” remix genuinely feels like something else: mutually messy risk-taking, honest reckoning with the fun-house mirrors of fame and conflict-resolution you can dance to.
And as an added bonus, its raw vulnerability makes the song feel relatable even if your supposed frenemy is not a globally successful pop star. Party girl or poet, you never really know what’s going on in someone else’s head when they’re not returning your texts, it turns out. Best not to project until you get together and work it out on the remix.
